When Tony Coles co-founded Cambridge biotech Yumanity in 2014, there were 900 people who applied for the company’s first 20 positions.

The enormous applicant base for the fledgling company — focused on developing drugs for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS — is a testament to the wide name recognition for the man who sold the San Francisco drugmaker Onyx Pharmaceuticals three years ago for $9.7 billion, and allowed Yumanity to choose the best and the brightest. But it also allowed Coles to do something else: Create a diverse workforce.

“Fifty-five percent of our employees are women. We think that’s a big deal,” Coles said in an interview. “It’s setting a foundation for diversity in the company that I think is important… Who’s heard of a biotech company at our stage with more women than men?”

Such commitment comes at a time when women are railing about their treatment in the biotech community, most recently with a financial communications firm seeing backlash when it hired female models to mingle with the mostly male crowd at an after party at the biggest biotech meeting of the year, the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.

Other companies are focused on hiring more women as well, including Dimension Therapeutics CEO Annalisa Jenkins, who said in a recent interview that 70 percent of her workforce is female.

Yumanity's dedication to diversity will continue as the company hires another 10 people, thanks to a $45 million financing round announced this week that will also help the company progress its drugs to clinical trials.

Coles commitment to diversity isn’t surprising, given that he is among the few African American executives in the industry.

But a yearning for a diverse workforce didn’t come from Coles’ personal life, he said. It was a lesson he learned as CEO of Onyx and as an executive at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, he said.

“The best way to get to the greatest number of good solutions was to have different points of view at the table,” Coles said. “And when you hire the best and brightest, you don’t care what it looks like or where it comes from.”